Yashraj00700 Instruction Drift Guard
Why this exists
This is a real, heavily validated problem, not a guess:
- anthropics/claude-code#77136 (423 reactions): "Claude... increasingly default to repetitive rhetorical tics and often struggle to produce coherent prose despite explicit style instructions."
- anthropics/claude-code#65961 (219 reactions): "Claude verbose code comments by default — ignores instructions to stop."
- anthropics/claude-code#1599 (61 reactions): "Claude clobbers correct typographic marks and can't be told otherwise."
Community reports (r/ClaudeCode, r/ClaudeAI, collected independently) describe the same pattern: by the 4th or 5th interaction in a session, style/formatting instructions stop being followed, as if the CLAUDE.md rules never existed.
The architectural reason: instructions sitting in a memory file (CLAUDE.md, an earlier turn, a system prompt) are passive context. Nothing re-checks them as the session grows and a recency-weighted context window buries them under newer turns. A skill loaded once at the start of a task has the same problem over a long enough session — it's read once, not re-verified.
The fix this skill provides: turn "remember the rule" into "mechanically re-check the rule," at any point in a session, as many times as needed. A regex/heuristic check doesn't degrade with context length the way model attention does.
Workflow
- At the start of a task with real style constraints, write them once to
.instruction-contract.yamlin the project root (seecontract.example.yamlfor the format). - At any point in the session — after the first output, after the tenth — run:
The contract is found automatically by walking up from the target file's directory looking forpython3 scripts/check_contract.py path/to/current-output.instruction-contract.yamlorinstruction-contract.yaml. Pass an explicit path as the first argument instead if you keep the contract somewhere else:check_contract.py contract.yaml path/to/current-output. - Fix whatever it flags. Re-run. This is cheap enough to run after every substantial turn in a long session, which is exactly when drift happens — no need to remember or retype the contract path each time.
What the contract can check
| Rule | Catches |
|---|---|
no_comments: true |
Code comments added despite "no comments" instructions (#65961) |
banned_phrases: [...] |
LLM rhetorical tics — "delve", "tapestry", "it's important to note", "in today's fast-paced world", boilerplate hedging |
quote_style: straight | curly |
Typographic-mark drift — smart quotes creeping in when the user wants straight ones or vice versa (#1599) |
max_line_length |
Line-length rules quietly abandoned over a long session |
banned_chars: [...] |
Any character/pattern the user explicitly banned (e.g. em-dashes) |
Honest limits
This checks mechanical, regex-checkable style rules — not tone, not correctness, not whether the code works. It's a narrow, re-runnable gate for the specific class of drift that's actually documented (formatting/style instructions), not a general "is this good" judge.